Realizing Rights of Nature: Sustaining Development and Democracy

Our project, Realizing Rights of Nature: Sustaining Development and Democracy, is part of the effort to examine issues relevant to the UN’s global sustainable development goals identified in Agenda 2030. Our research project particularly focuses on the actions of a growing number of jurisdictions over the past decade and a half to grant rights to nature. States have adopted laws, local municipalities have adopted local ordinances, and courts in various countries have ruled in favor of nature for its own benefit. Our project explores the potential challenges, politics, and resistance to conceiving and implementing such Rights of Nature (RoN) initiatives. Despite the seeming novelty of these initiatives, we place RoN within the longer history of the expansion of rights and the creation of new legal subjects which has characterized the “rights revolution” that began in the mid-20th century. We will analyse four potential tensions that will help to define the relationship of liberalism to the practice of recognizing the rights and political agency of non-humans. The first is the tension between RoN and property rights. The second is the tension between RoN and human rights. The third is the tension between individual and collective rights that RoN highlights. The fourth is the ability of democratic institutions, which claim legitimacy due to popular sovereignty and the protection of human freedom, to accommodate non-human legal subjects. We will show how RoN may require liberal societies to directly confront these questions.

A Symposium: National Interest, Representation, and the State: Implications for the Recognition of Rights of Nature

When: 5 June 2023, 9:30-17:00

Where: Humanistiska teatern (Humanities Theatre),

Thunbergsvägen 3C, 752 38  

Engelska Parken, Building 22, Uppsala University

The recognition of nature as a legal rightsholder has occurred in an increasing number of jurisdictions, particularly in the global South. In October of 2022, the Spanish Parliament approved the first rights-of-nature law in Europe when it recognized the legal personhood of the Mar Menor lagoon. Two questions that commonly arise when such legal recognition is contemplated are political as much as legal: how the representation of nature will be organized and the relation of its recognition as a rightsholder to concepts of the national interest. This symposium is designed to bring together scholars from different fields and members of the public for a conversation about these questions and their implications for the impact of rights of nature on democracy. To provide context and spark discussion scholars working in political and legal fields will discuss the themes of representation and national interest more broadly.

More information about the symposium will be posted shortly! 

CRS Environmental and Climate Humanities Seminar

Seth Epstein, Human Species Identity in the Anthropocene: A role for rights of nature?

Moderated by Martha Middlemiss Lé Mon, CRS

When: October 13, 2022 kl. 12.00-13.00

Where: room 22-0031 (same entrance as Humanistiska teatern), see map here: https://link.mazemap.com/k1hn0pOx

Online/Zoom: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/65781262334

A collaboration between CEMUS, Centre for Environment and Development Studies, Uppsala University and SLU, CRS, Centre for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society, Uppsala University, and Sofia Oreland, Department of Theology, Uppsala University.

Higher Seminar in Public Law, Faculty of Law, Uppsala University

"Empowering nature? A multi-disciplinary approach"

This seminar serves as an introduction to our project, which examines the implications for democratic participation and political institutions of contemporary efforts to recognize nature and natural features as rights-bearing legal subjects. We will do so by comparing these efforts with the historical recognition of other legal subjects, whose acknowledgment widened the circle of civic membership. For our seminar we are circulating a draft of the project’s first article, which explains our ideas in greater detail, and are looking forward to getting feedback on the draft and discussing future directions for the project.

22 April 2021, 13:15-15:00, on Zoom